Chapter One

"Do we really need to be just hangin' here, B?"

Buffy Summers's first instinct was to say something snide to her fellow Slayer, and a second later, she decided to give in to that instinct. After all, she was only talking about Faith here, and besides, she'd never been one to restrain herself from saying something snide. Outside of class, at least…

So she said, "Faith, any time you wanna book, feel free. It's just one vamp, I can probably handle it, even with one arm tied behind my back." She raised her right arm slightly, still in its sling after being strained during the fight against the Sisterhood of Jhe.

Defensively, Faith said, "You saying I can't?"

Suddenly wishing she'd ignored her first instinct, Buffy said, "No, Faith, I'm just saying that if you don't want to hang here, you can leave. Or not. I really don't care."

"Look at Little Miss Tight-ass. I was just askin', okay, B? Take a pill or something."

Rubbing the bridge of her nose with her good hand and closing her eyes in the vain hope of staving off a headache, Buffy said, "No, look—I'm sorry. I'm always a little testy after an apocalypse."

They were each sitting on a gravestone, the two on either end of a row of three, all of which had the name TOOMAJIAN carved into them. The stones Buffy and Faith sat on had been there for a while. The one between them was shiny and new, its occupant having died only within the last week. They'd been sitting there, in the midst of one of Sunnydale's dozen cemeteries, for the better part of half an hour, waiting for the inevitable. This one was the Restwell Cemetery, distinguished by the fact that there were no mausoleums. All the gravestones had a religious symbol carved into the gravestones above the name—crosses, Stars of David, what have you—and said graves were laid out in a strict linear pattern.

And how sad is it that I know all the cemeteries in town this well?

Shaking her head, Faith said, "Least you're alive to be testy. Beats the crap outta the alternative."

"True," Buffy said with a sigh.

Faith pulled one leg up so that her foot was resting on the edge of the grave, her knee near her chin. "I'll stick around, I guess. I mean, between the two of us, we make one whole Slayer, right?"

Buffy smiled, her gaze trailing back down to the sling, which was supposed to come off tomorrow. Not a moment too soon, as far as Buffy was concerned, but Dr. Klesaris had been pretty insistent that it stay on until then. As it was, the doc was stunned at how fast she was healing. Of course, Buffy couldn't tell Klesaris that she was the Slayer, the chosen one, the girl granted the power and ability to fight creatures of the night. She healed fast.

Or, rather, she thought, I'm one of the chosen two. When one Slayer died, a new one was activated, but whoever started the Slayer ball rolling millennia ago didn't account for CPR. When Buffy had died facing the Master, a new Slayer was called—but then Xander Harris had been able to revive Buffy with the "breath of life." Result: two Slayers for the price of one.

Right now, though, Faith's line about the two of them making one whole Slayer wasn't entirely a joke. Looking over at the other grave, Buffy saw that Faith's black eye had finally healed, but she had a cast on her right wrist—amusingly, a mirror image of the one on Giles's left—and Buffy had been able to tell from the way Faith walked that her cracked ribs weren't a hundred percent yet, either. It had been a brutal fight against the creatures that the Sisterhood of Jhe called forth from the Hellmouth, and it had taken a supreme effort from Buffy, Faith, and Angel on the physical side and Giles and Willow on the magical to avert the end of the world.

Indicating Buffy's sling with her head, Faith asked, "So when you getting that thing off?"

"Tomorrow. The day of the stupid assembly."

Faith grinned. "You mean there are assemblies that aren't stupid?"

"Good point. Buffy scores one for redundancy."

"What's the occasion?"

Copyright © 2006 Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation.